an insider's perspective, technical tips n' tricks in the era of the IT Revolution

September 03, 2013

VMworld 2013: Summary and Wrap-up + #Speed2Lead

Ah, VMworld 2013 San Francisco – we hardly knew ye! Was a huge year – as always – and to the folks in Europe, I can’t wait to see you in Barcelona!

If you feel a strange “post VMworld fun-void” and if you want MORE excitement – tune in to EMC’s MegaLaunch III tomorrow (Sept 4th) at noon ET, 9am pacific (and at different times around the globe – as it’s a global launch!) – or just click here, and follow #Speed2Lead on twitter!

I’ve done the final updates to all the blog posts (any download problems should be fixed), presentation content is there, and for all the demos I used, I’ve created links to download the high-resolution versions to use wherever you see fit.

Now – for the fun stuff :-) VMworld is about people, community, passion – as much as awesome tech. So many great memories, so much fun… Check out this fantastic girl who showed up at #v0dgeball – she’s one of the daughters of one of the EMC players, but more than that, she was an awesome cheerleader!

You can see the EMC team (we won!) here – all with a desire to win, but none of us more than Kara Banosian (who is the human force behind EMC’s overall presence at VMworld) and Andy Lesage on the right – a human blur - who was a furious competitor (winning in a final 1:1 battle royale against team Juniper who were also furious competitors). You’ll see someone was less than fierce off this start line :-)

Perhaps a less effective, but equally passionate play in the photo below :-)

Here are all the folks who played!

Check out a pile of photos (not just v0dgeball, but the whole of VMworld) – just click on the below:

If you’re ever wondering why people are so zonkered after these conferences, here’s my fitbit stats for the 6 days I was there (and doesn’t incorporate the late night, insanely scheduled days).

In the spirit of transparency (with only the most minor tweaks for confidential info), here was the wrap-up that I sent to the 4000 or so EMC SEs that are part of my extended family. If you’re interested – read on!

…

A huge thank you to the team that worked overtime (including the 80 EMC SEs who supported the booth) to pull off a great event! EMC's booth was overwhelmed! Our sessions were packed! We had 2x the social media footprint of others both in the run-up and during the event. The EMC Hands-on-Lab was full constantly! Great EMC-style execution!

There will be a deeper online EMC University course (also available to partners) that will present all the new VMware technical content all in more detail (and all presentations and demos have been posted to virtual geek) but I wanted to make sure everyone got the key info quickly on the big announcements!

Tons of improvements – but the compute layer of virtualization is in the "incrementally more awesome" phase. Other things are more face melting….

vCloud Hybrid Service is open for business:

This is a VMware Public Cloud.

It runs on VNX and uses Avamar for backup (you can see information on that in some of the session content in the links below).

It is part of EMC's Velocity Service Provider Program at the Gold level.

BTW – EMC IT is a customer – I will be working to get all the EMC SEs vCHS account of their own. I use it, and it's really cool!

NSX:

NSX does for the network what ESX did for compute: abstract, pool, and make automation much easier.

NSX doesn't replace physical network, it runs on TOP of it (using VXLAN and STT tunnels).

NSX at it's core has Nicira technology now integrated with vSphere 5.5 into the distributed virtual switch, and other features from the vCloud Networking Suite

VCE has an official position on the topic of SDN stacks – important for you to know because FUD will start to fly. They will fully embrace the future Cisco Insieme platform as part of the VCE BoM and support model, but customers can use the federated support to deploy NSX if they want to go that way.

I would recommend reading these articles to understand better. The second one does a BRILLIANT job of looking at the VMware/Cisco dynamic around this – I would read it and use that with customers who are paranoid about coopetion.

VSAN – this will be something every storage vendor needs to be sharp on.

VSAN takes the local storage (magnetic media, SSDs, PCIe flash) in a vSphere cluster and turns it into a big pool.

That pool then is used when you great virtual machines – creating a "container" (proto-vVol) for each VM. These are then replicated (as the protection method) using 2 or more copies on other servers in the cluster.

IOs get cached and redirected across the ethernet network as needed.

While some think that it may have a lower TCO than shared storage (aka VNX or other EMC and non-EMC shared storage models), this doesn't work out in practice (n copies of data, density, and other factors).

RATHER - the compelling nature of VSAN isn't CAPEX, but rather that the VMware administrators gets what they need, via a very simple UI and process, and can leverage excess capacity in the servers. The storage cannot be used to store things other than VMs – so unless EVERYTHING they need for storage for is VMs, they will need EMC (or someone else’s) storage.

VMware is in general positioning it at the SMB/SME market, and focused use cases (non-persistent VDI, test and dev) – but it will mature over time.

It's has a huge benefit for EMC. While there will surely be some EMC impact, the storage vendors that will be most impacted by this are folks in the market segments we don't serve particularly strongly (SMB) and some of the new startups.

It will GA in H1 2014

WHAT I’VE ASKED THE EMC SEs TO DO (and frankly what I would recommend to other folks at other storage companies) when it comes to VSAN:

FAMILIZARIZE yourself with VSAN technically (download the beta bits here, and look at the demos here)

GET GOOD at the discussion in this blog post (the big picture from an EMC/VMware standpoint on SDS).

DO NOT DISMISS these DAS/commodity architectures with your customer. They have a place, and if our posture is "just protect the shared storage", you will be an ostrich. You are more likely to get them to embrace shared storage if you embrace, and then extend in use cases which are not served by VSAN. Remember that we also embrace commodity hardware in many other places too (ViPR, Atmos, all our Virtual Appliances). The GA of virtual Recoverpoint Appliances (and the beta of the VM-level replication) also illustrate how we embrace "software only" data services.

BE CRISP on the discussion with customers of "VSAN is great if the only thing you need storage for is vSphere – and love these 'software only' distributed stacks – GO VSAN”. “If you have heterogeneous hypervisor + physical environment and are hooked on software-only distributed storage stacks – GO EMC ScaleIO”. “…And – if customers need a single platform that all sorts of workloads it all really well – at EMC that’s VNX.”

The reality is regardless that we’re going to see some field folks get really defensive, and they shouldn’t. Regardless of which way a customer goes, they will need broad infrastructure for things like NAS, B2D, Compliance, and much more, and more customers are served by the blended use case sweet spot of things like EMC VNX, as well as some of our purpose-built storage stacks (like XtremIO for VDI north of 1000 users as an example)

ENGAGE with your VMware colleagues.

Some other cool things:

The Americas VMware SE and Services team asked me to present at their "SE Conference" on Saturday. It was great to share our joint vision for SDS. Thank you Dave Schroeder and VMware Tech Services team!

Yes, there is a new gag video! See if you can decode some of the insider jokes :-) Check it out here: VMworld 2013: EMC Cloud Shop

Thanks again for following during VMworld 2013! Remember to tune in to EMC’s MegaLaunch III tomorrow (Sept 4th) at noon ET, 9am pacific (and at different times around the globe – as it’s a global launch!) – or just click here, and follow #Speed2Lead on twitter!

(Name and email address are required. Email address will not be displayed with the comment.)

Name is required to post a comment

Please enter a valid email address

Invalid URL

Please enable JavaScript if you would like to comment on this blog.

Disclaimer

The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions. Content published here is not read or approved in advance by Dell Technologies and does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Dell Technologies or any part of Dell Technologies. This is my blog, it is not an Dell Technologies blog.